Nano-Engineered Opto-Electro-Mechanical Sensors and Devices Enabled by Single Monolayer Materials

Abstract: Emerging two-dimensional materials such as graphene and transition metal dichalogenides offer very interesting optical, electrical, and mechanical properties for integration into devices and sensors enabling several unique applications. I will talk about some of our recent work on sensors and devices based on these monolayer materials. In the first part of the talk, I will introduce the use of monolayer graphene as a corrosion protection and protein functionalization layer in nanophotonic biosensors. I will then present a new type of a graphene enabled multimodal sensor that can measure protein-protein interactions in the full opto-electro-mechanical domain. This is achieved by uniquely integrating a nanoelectronic graphene field effect transistor (FET) based sensor and a nanoantenna based optical sensor on a nanomechanical resonator based sensor. This multimodal biosensor combines all the advantages of the single mode sensors and achieves a 100 times improvement in the linear sensing dynamic range. I will also show results on transparent graphene neural electrodes for simultaneous optical imaging and electrical recording with very high spatio-temporal resolution. Time-permitting, I will also talk about our efforts on making a microdisk laser with a monolayer MoS2 gain medium with a quantum “inefficiency” of 99%. 

Bio: Ertugrul Cubukcu received his B.S. and M.S. degrees both in physics from Bilkent University, Turkey and his Ph.D. degree in applied physics from Harvard University. Following his postdoctoral work at the University of California, Berkeley, he has joined the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania in 2011, where he is currently an assistant professor of Material Science and Engineering and, by courtesy, Electrical and Systems Engineering. He is the recipient of IEEE Photonics Society Young Investigator Award and TASSA Young Scholar Award. 
 
He is the author or coauthor of over 50 journal and conference papers. His group explores the nanoscale opto-electro-mechanical devices and sensors that utilize unique features of nanoantennas and two-dimensional materials. His work has been featured in Optics and Photonics News, MIT Technology Review, Newsweek, Nature Photonics, and Laser Focus World.

All seminars are held on Wednesdays from 12:00 noon-1:00 p.m. in the Bowen Hall Auditorium Room 222. A light lunch is provided at 11:30 a.m. in the Bowen Hall Atrium immediately prior to the seminar.